Jonathan Sumption is dangerously wrong about lockdown

Lord Sumption is one of Britain’s finest legal minds. As a former supreme court judge, he deserves our respect. But he is wrong when he says the lockdown is ‘incoherent’.

Sumption argues that the decision to run the risk of catching coronavirus should be down to each person. ‘What I’m advocating now is that the lockdown should become entirely voluntary. It is up to us, not the state, to decide what risks we are going to take with our own bodies,’ he told the BBC. 

Sumption was asked on the BBC how he could know the risk he was posing or running if, sitting in a theatre with no symptoms, he infected others. He said those individuals sitting next to him had every right to take the same risk he did in taking the decision to sit in the theatre. His civil liberties argument is a powerful one and flies in the face of the current thinking about the lockdown.